What the Hell Is Memoir: The Debate Is Ongoing….

Today I stumbled across a discussion on a thread in the Memoir Group on She Writes about the difference between memoir and autobiography which necessarily addresses the issue of what memoir is and isn’t. Hope Edelman, author of the best-selling The Possibility of Everything weighed in, ably giving the distinctions and definitions currently– and to me quite unfortunately– in vogue.

“Hope’s comment is germaine in my view: “This is what was once meant by “memoirs” with an S, as in “I’m writing the whole story of my life from the point of age and wisdom I’ve finally achieved.” A memoir is a more artfully rendered narrative that’s informed by memory and the author’s interpretation of events. Emotional truth is often as important, and sometimes even more desirable than factual accuracy. (Don’t shoot me, journalists! But this is true.)” –Hope Edelman.

I do take issue with “This is what was once meant…”– some of us still view “Memoir” this way. With respect to Ms. Edelman’s definition of memoir as an “artfully rendered narrative that’s informed by memory and the author’s interpretation of events” there is an implied assumption that a given narrative is art as opposed to the unadorned journal of catharsis it often is. Regarding the labored construct of “…artfully rendered narrative informed by memory…” Ms. Edelman’s own memoir, The Possibility of Everything, was penned in the wake of taking her daughter to a purported healer in Mexico. She must mean memory across the spectrum– encompassing very recent memory, that which is recalled in the wake of experience. By that definition everything one writes that is not in the present tense is memoir. “Factual accuracy” is another problematic phrase; we wouldn’t read memoir if we didn’t think we were reading a true story and a true story depends on fact. “Emotional truth” cannot possibly be truth or fact, as what one lives is experienced subjectively.

In any event, the “memoir” boom set in motion by Mary Karr’s The Liars Club and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes— although a number of wonderful contemporary autobiographical, memoir-ish narratives preceded that book such as Patricia Hampl’s A Romantic Education— has seen a shift in how memoir is defined.

In fact, in my view, the word has been hijacked to legitimize a recent– as in the last twenty-five years– sub-genre–if we can even dignify it all by calling it a genre– of personal confession/revelation, much of it by writers younger than those one might traditionally view to possess the sufficient perspective to write “memoir.” Accordingly, I am going to use the phrase “autobiographical narrative” to discuss what others call “memoir” in the remainder of this essay.

Numerous advocates of AN claim, and Ms. Edelman so alludes, that its objective is to locate one’s “personal truth”. I advocate for something more exact than the term “personal truth” to characterize what the best of autobiographical narrative in current favor offers– something along the lines of “realization”, even “epiphany” that on a good day, resonates with with the reader.

It appears to me that if “truth” finding is the mission, the matter of whether one is creating literature or not falls by the wayside. Further, in permitting ourselves to consume so much pulp nonfiction, we have created a market for it. We have become voyeurs, and we love that window into someone else’s private life– even to climb in the window and rummage through the underwear drawer. If the voyeuristic appetite did not exist, neither would AN.

Another attempt to legitimize autobiographical narrative has come about in the plea for redemptive endings. Understandably agents, editors and critics are tired of reading grueling personal stories that dead-end or in the words of Erin Hosier (She Writes’ resident agent) keep getting worse. “Where’s the hope?” she writes in a recent blog post. Great memoir across the ages has not depended upon a redemptive ending. It has depended upon the quality of the telling of the story.

For a time the phrase “creative nonfiction” was applied to personal narrative and still is as a genre for the M.F.A. and in other venues. But the abandonment of the goal of the creation of a work of art/literature, the sacrifice of the vision for the extraordiness of the ordinary that characterizes art for the temporal reward of a purge, has meant that creative nonfiction has itself descended to the level of autobiographical narrative. In turn there is a further descent into “expose'”– the salty opportunistic and exploitative accounts of someone else’s private life, also in favor.

I just completed the memoir of a trip I took thirty-seven years ago (Nightfall in Verona, sample chapter here). In the epilogue I say that I could not have written it any earlier– I was too close to the story and some of the things standing in the way of/eclipsing my appreciation of the experience had not yet healed and dissipated. A degree of distance gave me the ability to paint with a full palette, to incarnate the experience in art, I pray. Obtaining distance from the subject frees one to focus on craft– the sharp edges of experience have been worn down and time has given it luminosity— the light cast by a thing’s essence.

To me this supports the argument for waiting, perhaps writing about something to “get it out” or make a record, and then putting it away. My most recent piece on life with a mentally ill mother, Notes on a Yellow Rose, posted at Loquaciously Yours, is far more compassionate than my decades earlier numerous published poems about her– most of them bitter, focused on her shortcomings, sent out into the world with the attitude that I had the right to “my truth” and to hell with how she felt mirrored at her worst in the pages of my books. Another strike against most of the AN books in favor; proponents argue that personal truth is primary no matter the cost to others.

When I was younger I wrote about many things as a victim, unable to see my part in them and certainly numb to anything redemptive in the people close to me whose business I put in the street for the sake of my literary ego. I contend that many people writing expose’ (trash-personal narrative) about their families, significant others, their addictions and other follies, are committing the same sin not only against others, but against art.

Part and parcel of my viewpoint is that if we all love literature, we need to protect it. We need to protect the genres that define it by protecting the traditions that gave rise to and define that genre. Granted that there is blurring of the lines between genres and the emergence of sub-genres, et cetera, I believe in protecting the genre of memoir by continuing to argue that at its best it is written by someone generally viewed to have much to say, or to have been in public life, from the position of looking back a good distance from events.

Unquestionably, thanks to Oprah Winfrey and other book-loving high profile people , there is a growing market for stories of falling down and getting back up. In our spiritually impoverished culture there is also a call, as Ms. Hosier states in her post, for the first person nonfiction story to yield redemption and a take-away. The jury is out on whether the plethora of books on the market termed “memoir” — Eat Pray Love, Pillhead, Cherry, Fury, Running with Scissors, The Glass Castle, et al, will endure the test of time to be regarded as literature.

That’s hilarious. Thanks for stopping by– will come by your place later. Hope you’re having great weekend….! xj

Please visit award-winning, published writer Jenne’ Andrews ‘ new WordPress blog at http://www.loquaciouslyyours.com . Click the “comment” link at the bottom of any post, and sign up to receive an e-mail flash of new content.

I love the way you deconstruct…you are so thorough and your reasons and explanations are always so logical and make such sense to me. Thank you for addressing all the subleties involved in defining memoir. I still feel that my writing about the 16 years I was an innkeeper should be called a memoir. Whether or not the literary world feels that it fits into their definition of the genre somehow doesn’t seem to matter to me. Writing for publication is not my main reason. Writing for clarity and “personal revelation”, as you put it, is.

Whenever the past is involved, I think we have memoir/remembering, re-membering, bringing the past to life via telling its story. When I wrote my memoir– and I’m certainly not calling myself an experienced memoirist– my epiphanies– that I was afraid to trust or couldn’t trust– certainly arose but mainly I hoped to tell a good story, putting the reader “there”– I hope you do write the book because it will be terrific. xxxj

Please visit award-winning, published writer Jenne’ Andrews ‘ new WordPress blog at http://www.loquaciouslyyours.com . Click the “comment” link at the bottom of any post, and sign up to receive an e-mail flash of new content.

I am propped up breathless in my desk chair with an ache in every inch down to the bone, and a bull’s-eye rash where the sun don’t shine, clattering chills. I am sick with Lyme and I don’t even have my laptop, it crashed Sunday night. Monday a tree crashed on my parents’ 1702 house. My younger nephew’s car blew, unfixable, and he commutes to Hartford every day. My other nephew lost his brand new wedding ring in Long Island sound. Tomorrow there will be a heat advisory here. This has nothing to do with the above post. It’s just that I haven’t commented in awhile and miss it.

I’ve missed you too. Things are just things but when they break or disappear– tough! Hope you feel better very soon. I love hearing from you, LB– xxj

Please visit award-winning, published writer Jenne’ Andrews ‘ new WordPress blog at http://www.loquaciouslyyours.com . Click the “comment” link at the bottom of any post, and sign up to receive an e-mail flash of new content.

Jenne, I think you are right to set the high standard for memoir that you do. I think of Isak Dinesen, whose “Out of Africa” is one of the most luminous memoirs I have ever read. Afterward, I went to her letters, hoping and expecting to find more haunting stories about the land and people around her farm “at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” But in the letters instead was the raw material for the memoir. A few more details, a better sense of continuity, perhaps. Many of the narratives were about the same events, but it was obvious that they were relatively raw, not crafted, writing. At the time, I was disappointed. Now, I get it. Maybe one could say her book was memoir, her letters (though very fine) were autobiographical narrative. I have read only a few of the books you mention, and I’m sure that you are right to class some of them as other than memoir. But I love Mary Karr! I devoured “Eat, Pray, Love”! What is being done in such works is something valuable and valued at this point in time. I’m no sociologist, so don’t get me started! Plus, I was an editor for a long time, and I’m still in recovery from the high dudgeon occasioned by people using the “wrong word” for something! Be well.

Thanks, Penny. I’ve revised this on the blog several times to try to be more clear myself. Do your remember that Mary Karr was in our group as a young and obnoxiously good poet? Amazing! I understand your point and I’m sure it’s true. I love “high dudgeon”– thanks for weighing in. BTW I wonder if you saw the interview with me on Writing Without Paper? I’ll try to get the link to you. xJenne’

I did see the interview and thought it was excellent. I don’t remember Mary Karr, so I believe she joined the group after I left, in fall 1973. Things really took off for you all after that. I was incredibly jealous when you brought out the Vanilla Press book and I wasn’t included. I’ve repressed the reasons for my bad feeling about the group (hope to recover them eventually), but I left MN quite bitter. I threw in my lot with a man I met that year, left the one I was with, my beloved apartment, my cats, my antique furniture, and almost everything else I owned to hitchhike across country. To “vagabond,” as we thought of it. Poor souls, romantic bastard Buddhist pilgrims. Two months later we were in Los Angeles, by way of St. Louis, New Orleans, South Texas, Taos, and Santa Fe. After a five-year on-and-off (sometimes so off!) relationship, he was gone for good, but I stuck here in L.A. I was glad to find your blog for many reasons. I need to go back and reclaim that baby poet/person I was then, whom I abandoned. I see you doing something of the kind now, for different reasons. It would be fantastic for me if we could compare notes on the “old days.” And see where it takes us.

I fully and wholly understand the pain of exclusion and how it can fester for years. I am sorry that you have been through this, Penny. As I recall, I didn’t have much editorial control. If I could republish the anthology it would include a poem from every woman who wished to be included. We were young and self-absorbed in those days. I remember many clashes with Marisha Chamberlain over the anthology as well as some deeply painful interactions with her. It is very difficult to put oneself out “there” with one’s creative work. I have yet to summon the courage to join the salmon migration of trying to land in a good literary magazine again. Writers, writers everywhere…. I would love to interview you and include your work on my blog. And I take you up on comparing notes regarding that time as a poet and time of life as women. xxxJenne’

Please visit award-winning, published writer Jenne’ Andrews ‘ new WordPress blog at http://www.loquaciouslyyours.com . Click the “comment” link at the bottom of any post, and sign up to receive an e-mail flash of new content.

I am grateful for this because you have answered some recent questions for me. I am a reader but am not a professional writer and I didn’t understand why there was disagreement between reviewers about some of the “memoirs” I’ve enjoyed. You have explained with such clarity and, although I am still fond those particular books, I now understand why they are not memoir. Are the publishing houses responsible for this “confusion.” I am going to read all that you have sited here.
Gerry

Thanks, Gerry! That’s a lot of reading. And, of course, many people don’t agree with me. They stand by the sea change in the definition of memoir and the right to write it young….xxxj

Please visit award-winning, published writer Jenne’ Andrews ‘ new WordPress blog at http://www.loquaciouslyyours.com . Click the “comment” link at the bottom of any post, and sign up to receive an e-mail flash of new content.